According to scientists, there are five senses: Taste, touch, sight, women’s intuition and feel. As for me, I’m both blessed and cursed with a sixth sense: The sense of knowing if someone has masturbated in a room simply by stepping into it.

It comes on first as a faint, white specter hanging about the room. A presence. Then it sharpens slowly and rhythmically into a distinct feeling of needing to wash my hands. The feeling keeps intensifying, welling up inside of me. Up. Up. Up. Finally, it washes uncontrollably over me. I see women, children, politicians, pilgrims, prehistoric American Indians, the first humans. All masturbating. I can see their grimacing faces, the damp palms, the bunched tissue paper, the crinkled Penthouse or, in the case of the American Indians, the crude pornography scratched onto birch bark or deer hide. It is a threesome. Two men and a women–or is it the other way around? Who knows. The images are already gone. But in that short moment, I will have learned more about these ancient masturbators than even their wives or children or archaeologists could ever know.

But like I said, this gift is also a curse. For one thing, my sixth sense means that I have to avoid certain places: Public highschools and libraries, men’s locker rooms and the entire state of West Virginia. In these places, the overwhelming power of millions of masturbators past would just be too much to handle. Once, I had to leave a tour of the Whitehouse early because I was so disturbed by the image of Lincoln jacking off into a chamberpot while whistling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, a polished mahogany crutch supporting his massive log.

My sixth sense is a pain sometimes, sure. But if I had to be born all over again, I don’t think I would change a thing. See, I never had many friends growing up. I spent hours alone in my room playing with Legos, but I never felt lonely. I always had constant companionship in the sweat-stained faces of the thousands that had once stopped there–however briefly–to masturbate.

"I believe he is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime leader that can bring our nation together and restore America's moral leadership in the world..."Bill Richardson, hispano, gobernador de New Mexico y cinco veces nominado para el Premio Nobel de La Paz.

A continuación os dejo un artículo de opinión publicado por Roger Cohen en el New York Times a propósito de este discurso titulado "America´s Original Sin"

There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.

As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!

The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.

Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.

The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.

A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.

Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.

Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.

Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.

A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.

Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.

I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

Yes. It. Can.

The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.

Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.

The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”

But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”

domingo, 2 de marzo de 2008

This scale puts your partner responsible for deciding whether to lie or hit you with the truth. Suitable for cohabiting partners.

Asimov’s First Law

“A robot may not harm a human being.”The first law of robotics by Isaac Asimov.

Artificial intelligence is a topic widely used in the media, however, exactly how far are we from such technology? Are these fears towards robotic developments necessary or purely irrational? What is it about these currently fictional characters that scare us? Are there existing domestic objects that already break this law?

Scales, although they don’t perform physical harm, have been subtly damaging us psychologically. Should objects like these exist in a complex society like ours where people are more emotionally fragile?

WHITE LIESThis scale allows one to lie to him/herself. The further back you stand, the lighter you become. The user can gradually move closer and closer to reality.

HALF-TRUTHThis scale puts your partner responsible for deciding whether to lie or hit you with the truth.

OPEN SECRETThis scale reveals your weight every time you weigh yourself by sending a text message to the desired mobile phone. The receiver is then responsible to reveal the answer immediately or the next time you two meet.